Friday, February 20, 2009

Green Card Madness. And Friday Food.

We almost have all the green card stuff together, except for things that need copying or updating and one more thing that needs to come in the mail. I am pretty sure that this is all a formality... but I really think that, apart from things like serious accidents, terminal illness, and possibly nasty divorces, about the most stressful thing that you can go through is the whole immigration process. It makes you crazy like nothing else. It's kind of like labor in that everyone's got a long story about it, some of them awful and worrying, and there genuinely are a lot of things that can go wrong. Getting Michael's K-1 visa... the visa that let him come to the US to get married... took more than six months, cost a lot of money, and stressed us both out beyond belief. And this was coming from a country that they don't scrutinize hard (the UK). If you're coming from somewhere like Iraq, or if you come from a country like China where names are similar so background checks can take decades... well, magnify our stress by thousands. And then after you get married, you have to file loads more paperwork to get your conditional green card, and then 2 years later, you have to file it all again, because something could have gone wrong with your marriage, or it could have been fake to begin with... and besides, then USCIS gets to charge you another filing fee and another biometrics fee. But at least after this, you're basically DONE. Another year and he can apply for citizenship, and then no more paperwork, forever. And a lot of other things, like financial forms, get easier too, because to own asset accounts, if you're not a U.S. citizen, you have to fill out all sorts of things.

And we're both assuming that this is straightforward, but you never know, and because you don't know, it makes you a little crazy. Hopefully we can send this off on Monday. And then we just wait wait wait for about six or seven months, I think.

Food. Really boring, and no pictures.

Quiche for breakfast. Must make more tomorrow.Leftover chicken curry for lunch.Got home from the statistics exam ready to eat anything not nailed down, and had 3.5 oz. salmon leftover from last night.And then we had shrimp stir fry for dinner, which looked exactly like the pic I took last week, so I was too lazy to take a picture of it. A sugar-free chocolate.And somewhere along the line, I had a couple of the tiny hamburgers I made the other day.

Tomorrow... if I have time... I need to do my big cooking for the week. Make soup and Jell-O and chicken wings and quiche. Which is going to be a little hard to fit in since I have to give makeup exams and maybe play racquetball if I am not coughing my lungs out. The sore throat is gone, I think, so I'm hopeful.